For a second forget your GREEN commitment, and forget your responsibility towards carbon neutrality. Energy is a very crucial part of your manufacturing process, a big chunk of operating expenses. It has to be taken seriously. With ever increasing energy costs, energy monitoring is taking up increasing attention from the management. Whether or not you look at energy from the point of view social responsibility, it has a direct impact on your bottom-line, an area you need to manage properly.
EMS, or Energy Monitoring Solution, is a tool for you to monitor the energy usage of your manufacturing assets. Crucial parameters like energy consumption, power factor, etc. enable you to closely monitor and take corrective actions. You get to see the energy consumption of machines, compare similar machine across different locations, and against industry benchmarks. Improper usage of machinery (e.g. frequent overloading of a motor), and faulty electrical components can be identified. The reports and historical data allow deep analysis, and provide the energy auditors a complete trail per machine/site.
When the initial energy monitoring solutions started springing up in the market place, these were independent standalone systems doing exactly that: monitoring your assets for energy parameters. However, with time, these solutions have integrated with other solutions, especially asset management solutions to provide a single application. The end-users demand for a one-stop solution to monitor and manage all their assets. Increasingly, the integration of such systems with enterprise applications like ERP is also widespread now. The manufacturing sector (especially in India) may have woken up to the call a little late that most (especially the facilities management), but the recognition and acknowledgement of the requirement is increasing. Rightly so, as manufacturing is the biggest consumer of energy (definitely electrical) as compared to Facilities & Buildings, Logistics, or Enterprise.
The push for better and smarter energy solutions from end users will only amplify with time. The following will be primarily factors driving this:
1) Energy prices will continue to rise
2) Government legislations towards energy efficiency
3) Energy management will move from tactical to strategic
With the continuous convergence of IT and manufacturing, expected advancements in IoT (Internet of Things), and sophisticated data analytics, the EMS sector is poised for advancing in leaps and bounds. The business drivers together with the technological infrastructure will lead to the better and advanced features in the EMS space.
Ascent Informatics offers, PlantConnect®-EMS, a cloud-based energy monitoring platform that provides detailed visibility into energy usage and uses intelligent analytics to suggest process corrections and energy savings. All this is made possible via a rich dashboards, reports, and alarms. For more information, visit us at www.plantconnect.net
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